Unseemly tears

12:01AM GMT 07 Nov 2004

Many listeners to the BBC were rightly outraged last week by the broadcast from its Middle East correspondent, Barbara Plett, in which she cloyingly described how she wept as Yasser Arafat was airlifted from Ramallah for medical treatment.

She said: "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry . . . without warning." Almost as a footnote, she later admitted that an "ambivalence towards violence" was one of his failings.

When Mr Arafat took over the PLO in the 1960s, he supported a campaign of hijackings and bombings which acted as the foundation for much of the escalating Middle Eastern terrorism of today. He summarily rejected the 2000 Camp David deal, which offered a generous compromise between Israelis and Palestinians, and his Palestinian Authority has since been linked to funding Palestinian terrorists.

Ms Plett's flood of feeling is just the most overt and recent manifestation of a pro-Palestinian bias endemic within the BBC. As a publicly-funded organisation, it should remember that it is not paid to take sides. As things stand, however, we might conclude that Mr Arafat's culpable "ambivalence towards violence" is echoed by our national broadcaster.